About

Hi, I'm Thai‑Nam.

I grew up in Ho Chi Minh City, which means I learned to navigate chaotic traffic before I learned calculus. Both turned out to be useful.

At 18, I left Vietnam on a scholarship to Beloit College in Wisconsin — a small liberal arts school in the middle of cornfields, approximately as far from home as physically possible. While the rest of the world was on lockdown, I was writing full-stack code for MoMo, Vietnam's largest fintech app, helping scale campaigns to 21 million users between classes. I finished a double major in three years. Wisconsin winters helped with focus.

After graduation I went back to Ho Chi Minh City and joined The Data Nerd, where I led a team building real-time blockchain analytics pipelines and LLM-powered interfaces. Somewhere in there a startup raised half a million dollars, which still surprises me more than anyone.

Then I thought: why stop now? So I moved to Lausanne for a Master's in Data Science at EPFL, where I spend my days training models on satellite imagery, reading papers about reinforcement learning, and pretending the Alps are a normal thing to see on the way to class.

Currently

Wrapping up my Master's and looking for what comes next — ideally somewhere at the intersection of research and building real things. If that sounds like your team, I'd love to talk.

The story, in order

  1. 2019Beloit, WI, USA

    Landed in cornfields

    Left Ho Chi Minh City on a full scholarship to Beloit College, Wisconsin. Population: 36,000. Corn: plentiful. Culture shock: immense.

  2. 2020–21Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

    Built fintech during a pandemic

    While the world panic-bought toilet paper, I was writing fullstack code for MoMo — Vietnam's largest fintech app — scaling campaigns to 21 million users between Zoom lectures.

  3. 2022Madison, WI, USA

    Satellites & wildfires

    Research internship at UW-Madison building deep generative models on GOES-16/17 satellite imagery for early wildfire detection. Presented at AAAI with NASA and NOAA. Still surreal.

  4. 2022Beloit, WI, USA

    Out in three

    Finished a double major in CS and Math in three years. Partly ambition, partly Wisconsin winters leaving very few alternatives.

  5. 2023Remote / Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

    Blockchain & LLMs

    Joined The Data Nerd as Lead Engineer. Built real-time blockchain analytics pipelines, LLM-powered interfaces, and helped the team raise $500K in angel investment. Still not sure how.

  6. 2023–nowLausanne, VD, Switzerland

    The Alps are not normal

    Master's in Data Science at EPFL. Satellite trajectory prediction, reinforcement learning, and pretending it's completely normal to see the Alps on the way to class.

Things I work with

PyTorchLLMsComputer VisionRLFastAPIReactTypeScriptSatellite ImageryRAGDockerHPC / SlurmAWS

Let's build something worth remembering.

Open to full-time roles in ML research, applied AI, or anything at the edge of math and product. Based in Lausanne, open to relocation.

Say hello→LinkedInGitHub